Beyond Black

€ 13.95

Alison Hart is a medium by trade :dead people talk to her, and she
talks back. With her flat-eyed, flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, she
tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road, passing on
messages from dead ancestors :'Granny says she likes your new kitchen
units.'

Alison's ability to communicate with spirits is a
torment rather than a gift. Behind her plump, smiling and bland
public persona is a desperate woman. She knows that the next life
holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients.

Her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her
childhood, the thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her
hopeless, addled mother, Emmie. They infiltrate her house, her body
and her soul; the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and
nastier they become.

This tenth novel by Hilary Mantel, the
critically acclaimed author of Giving Up the Ghost, is a witty and
deeply sinister story of dark secrets and dark forces, set in an
England that jumps at its own shadow, a country whose banal
self-absorption is shot through by fear of the engulfing dark.